Taking a Stand: Contemporary US Stand-Up Comedians as Public Intellectuals

By Peter C. Kunze

Contributions by Jared N. Champion, Miriam M. Chirico, Thomas Clark, David R. Dewberry, Christopher J. Gilbert, David Gillota, Kathryn Kein, Rob King, Rebecca Krefting, Peter C. Kunze, Linda Mizejewski, Aviva Orenstein, Raúl Pérez, Philip Scepanski, Susan Seizer, Monique Taylor, Ila Tyagi, and Timothy J. Viator

Stand-up comedians have a long history of walking a careful line between serious and playful engagement with social issues: Lenny Bruce questioned the symbolic valence of racial slurs, Dick Gregory took time away from the stage to speak alongside Martin Luther King Jr., and—more recently—Tig Notaro challenged popular notions of damaged or abject bodies. Stand-up comedians deploy humor to open up difficult topics for broader examination, which only underscores the social and cultural importance of their work.

Taking a Stand: Contemporary US Stand-Up Comedians as Public Intellectuals draws together essays that contribute to the analysis of the stand-up comedian as public intellectual since the 1980s. The chapters explore stand-up comedians as contributors to and shapers of public discourse via their live performances, podcasts, social media presence, and political activism.

Each chapter highlights a stand-up comedian and their ongoing discussion of a cultural issue or expression of a political ideology/standpoint: Lisa Lampanelli’s use of problematic postracial humor, Aziz Ansari’s merging of sociology and technology, or Maria Bamford’s emphasis on mental health, to name just a few. Taking a Stand offers a starting point for understanding the work stand-up comedians do as well as its reach beyond the stage. Comedians influence discourse, perspectives, even public policy on myriad issues, and this book sets out to take those jokes seriously.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Nov 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781496835505

Book preview

Introduction

LAUGHING OUT LOUD

Stand-Up Comedians in the Public Sphere

Jared N. Champion and Peter C. Kunze

In 2015, the journalist Megan Garber proposed in The Atlantic that comedians had harnessed the power of social media to become public intellectuals. Comedians are fashioning themselves not just as joke-tellers, she observed, but as truth-tellers—as intellectual and moral guides through the cultural debates of the moment.¹ Holding up the recent television success of Amy Schumer (Inside Amy Schumer [2013–2016]), Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele (Key and Peele [2012–2015]), Abby Jacobson and Ilana Glazer (Broad City [2014–2019]), and such seasoned stand-up comedians as Patton Oswalt, Sarah Silverman, and Nick Kroll as examples, Garber argued that comedians’ jokes double as arguments. In so doing, she said, they insert themselves into the national dialogue as voices of reason dedicated to social change.

These claims undoubtedly amused scholars of comedy and humor, who have long explored how comedians operate as spokespeople for and commentators on society. In US culture, one need only look to the wisdom of the crackerbox philosophers, the varied works of Mark Twain, the Semple stories of Langston Hughes, the newspaper columns of Will Rogers, or the poetry of Dorothy Parker for a nuanced balance of cultural criticism and humor.² Garber’s argument, in fact, depends on a blatant straw man that pigeonholes contemporary comedy as the onetime province of angsty and possibly drug-addled white guys making jokes about their needy girlfriends and airplane food—a bold swipe at the likes of Bill Hicks, Marc Maron, and Jerry Seinfeld. Garber not only dismisses the complexity of these performers’ comedy, but she also neglects a wealth of comedians of color and women comedians who perform much of the same intellectual labor as those more recent comedians she exalts. The work of Moms Mabley, Dick Gregory, Joan Rivers, Phyllis Diller, and Lily Tomlin engaged with the social politics of their time while also imagining radical futures where political power would be redistributed and cultural citizenship would be guaranteed. Indeed, Rebecca Krefting’s influential work on charged humor—that is, politically engaged humor that contests social injustice and the marginalization of minoritized citizens—clearly demonstrates how comedians see themselves not just as entertainers, but very often as advocates, gadflies, and even moral authorities.³ While Garber admits that Carlin, Pryor, and Rivers were engaged in productive subversion, she hesitates to elevate them to the public intellectual status she so readily affords to Schumer and company.

But Garber does make one point that even scholars of humor and comedy might build upon in their own work: the reception of these comedians as intellectuals. While we can find intellectualism in the work of humorists and comedians dating back to the earliest days of American humor, we would be well served to examine not just what these individuals said, but the power they were afforded in the public sphere as knowledgeable, credible articulators of these ideas. Late-night television was long been a forum for this kind of intellectual performance, as shows such as Politically Incorrect (1993–2002) gave stand-up comedians equal footing with academics, activists, and politicians. When Janeane Garofalo decried Tea Partiers as racists to Keith Olbermann on MSNBC or Dennis Miller railed against liberal snowflakes on Fox News’s The O’Reilly Factor (1996–2017), they were mobilizing their public status as prominent comedians to vocalize their personal political investments. Similarly, when Sarah Silverman appeared at the Democratic National Convention, she channeled her popularity as a comedian to draw attention to the need for unity among Democrats after a tense showdown between the party’s nominee, Hillary Clinton, and her primary opponent, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, whom Silverman had publicly supported throughout the primary. Garofalo, Miller, and Silverman demonstrate stand-up comedians’ long-standing commitment to engaging with the major issues and ideas of their times. In fact, one might rightly argue that such engagement is essential to what comedians do. Comedians are rare as entertainers in that their acts are in a constant state of flux, as jokes may be tweaked depending on the venue, the audience, or the day’s events. They must be rhetorically sophisticated about assessing and understanding the context they are entering into in any given performance to ensure maximum comedic effectiveness. Furthermore, the very art of stand-up comedy requires performers to assume an upright posture and to address (and respond to) the audience in front of them; this essential posturing conveys status and power as well as qualities of aggression and authority.⁴ By necessity, they are very often astute observers of the sociopolitical moment in which we live, prepared to comment on it and defend their point of view against potentially unresponsive or hostile audiences.

The public roles that comedians have assumed over time warrants our continuing attention, and this collection draws attention to recent endeavors along these lines. Our focus on the present has two goals. First, we want to direct scholarly consideration to both emerging and established comedians, some of whom are being discussed here at length by academics for the first time. Second, we want to consider the current social and cultural moment as one of change—technologically, politically, and intellectually. To this end, we continue the critical conversation around stand-up comedy as a cultural form that is, in the words of Matthew R. Meier and Casey R. Schmitt, uniquely rhetorical and capable of engaging discourses of social change by calling into question dominant cultural practices and assumptions."⁵ Discussing stand-up comedians as public intellectuals allows the writers included here to consider the enduring importance of both comedians and intellectuals to US culture and the national discourse around social and political issues. We hope that this work furthers the ongoing public and scholarly conversation of the sociopolitical and intellectual significance of comedy in the United States.

Before proceeding any further, we need to unpack the term public intellectual, a concept that is seemingly self-evident in the naming and yet takes on many meanings depending on who is using it. Most discussions of intellectualism rightfully return to Antonio Gramsci’s foundational work on traditional and organic intellectuals. Whereas traditional intellectuals continue the long-standing convention of learned individuals being trained within the academy for lives of institutional service and administration, the organic intellectual emerges from within the group itself to inspire, organize, and lead her people. Gramsci proposed that All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.⁶ Edward Said largely supports this notion, noting how both radical and reactionary movements have found leadership through the labor of intellectuals.⁷ Said importantly adds:

The central fact for me is, I think, that the intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public. And this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d’être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.⁸

We can see in Said’s words an affinity with Rebecca Krefting’s aforementioned proposal that charged humor serves to empower the marginalized through a direct confrontation with power structures that perpetuate inequality and disenfranchisement. Especially important here is the idea of the public intellectual as a communicator both of and for these people. Megan Garber herself admits that laughter [serves] as a lubricant for cultural conversations—to help us to talk about the things that needed to be talked about,⁹ an idea often articulated by humor scholars. Regina Barreca, for instance, contends that humor and comedy have always been the most effective way to put abstract impressions into specific and precise language: to reduce experience, emotion, or thought into its essence—without misrepresenting it—is a kind of alchemy.¹⁰ Stand-up comedians must be able to build intimate relationships with their audiences, and their ability to do so allows them to push against established worldviews, thereby prompting laughter.¹¹ The artfulness of stand-up comedy lies in the careful combination of complex ideas, accessible communication, and engaging performance. If comedians falter on any of these fronts, they risk alienating their audience.

This is not to say that all comedians assert themselves as public intellectuals; rather, understanding comedians as such requires us to give credit to the arduous task of translating nuanced concepts, theories, or positions in a way that is succinct, understandable, and captivating. In his study of public intellectuals, Richard A. Posner observes that most intellectuals remain in the academy because their role as specialists rarely prepares them for a life of public intellectualism, in which they have to serve occasionally as a critical commentator addressing a nonspecialist audience on matters of broad public concern.¹² Much of that labor, Posner argues, rests on journalists, who explain the ideas for a general audience.¹³ Posner’s definition, therefore, distinguishes between a scenario in which the intellectual works within their academic discipline to develop sophisticated ideas and the journalist who translates that intellectual’s ideas for a reading public, and a second scenario in which the public intellectual translates his or her ideas directly for the public through editorials, talk show appearances, and trade books. According to Posner, then, stand-up comedians may be translators, but they are rarely public intellectuals.

In his recent book, The Ideas Industry, Daniel W. Drezner separates public intellectuals from thought leaders. While he acknowledges that both groups engage in acts of intellectual creation, public intellectuals have a broad knowledge they can use to critique and even expose intellectual charlatans, whereas thought leaders tend to become cheerleaders for a single, game-changing idea.¹⁴ Boiling it down to a series of oppositions, Drezner sees public intellectuals generally to be critics, skeptics, and pessimists by trade, and thought leaders as creators, evangelists, and optimists.¹⁵ In reading this list, one can see how stand-up comedians can move among these categories. Like public intellectuals, stand-up comedians benefit from a certain status, wherein they develop an outsider personality that allows them to present themselves as uncompromised individuals who can comment on their society without being tainted by its influence.¹⁶ John Limon has gone so far as to suggest that stand-up comedians are compelled to channel their abjection into their art, which allows them to escape it precisely by living it as an act.¹⁷ Similarly, Jessyka Finley explores how Black women comics have employed stand-up comedy from the position of their own marginality … as an attempt to equalize the duties and responsibilities of citizenship and everyday life.¹⁸ On the other hand, stand-up comedy is a commercial endeavor that requires participants to satisfy their customers in order to achieve a livable income, let alone popularity and prestige.

For the latter reason, Elizabeth Bruenig of The New Republic dismissed Garber’s argument because the Jon Stewarts and Stephen Colberts of the comedy world possess a special motivation to flatter their audiences … win some laughs and get good ratings.¹⁹ This rather facile response echoes a vulgar Marxism that fails to acknowledge the sophistication of stand-up comedy as an artform, preferring instead to dismiss it out of hand as commercial dreck. Again, we might return to Said, who argued that rather than dismissing, for example, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre for his friendships and rivalries, one should embrace these complications [to] give texture and tension to what he said, expos[ing] him as a fallible human being, not a dreary and moralistic preacher.²⁰ Indeed, comedians are very often what Lawrence E. Mintz has called "negative exemplars" whose numerous defects allow us not only to find them amusing, but to identify with them.²¹ It is here, with our guard down, that we may become open to new ideas through suggestion or musing rather than overbearing didacticism. Bambi Haggins proposes this very notion at the end of her influential study of post-soul African American stand-up comedians:

Although the black comedy of both the civil rights era comics and post-soul comics, like the entertainment-based moments of philanthropy discussed earlier, might seem unlikely repositories for serious discourse on race and class, it is within spaces not marked as necessarily pedantic or particularly threatening that folks might actually become open to questioning their ideological presuppositions—whether during their spectatorial experience or in their postviewing musing. And the comic messenger makes a difference.²²

In a culture long criticized for its anti-intellectualism, stand-up comedians in the United States have become one avenue for the exploration and promotion of a range of ideas, whether one is discussing gender roles, immigration, post-racialism, or mental illness. Even if the idea is not originally their own, it is rather hard to dismiss completely the valuable work being performed by such comedians in rendering these ideas public, accessible, and (perhaps most impressively) funny.

With this observation in mind, we might be better served by shifting our understanding of public intellectual from an identity in society to a type of labor one can perform for the public. Discounting the social and cultural value of comedians who introduce, repackage, and endorse these ideas because they do so in a shorter form, in a commercial context, or on the backs of real intellectuals is an arbitrary distinction. Both labors are important, and just as journalists provide a valuable service in translating ideas for their readers, so too do comedians, although they provide that valuable service in a different medium and context. Both services are intellectual in nature; they are simply different in the kind of intellectual labor that they perform compared to the specialist based in a university setting. Considering stand-up comedians as public intellectuals, therefore, allows us to examine different roles that comedians play within our national discourse while also re-examining the oft-cited presumption that the United States has long been afflicted by anti-intellectualism—at least, periodically.²³ In a political moment when a president attempts to enact authoritarian measures and the very concept of truth is called into question, comedy becomes an invaluable weapon for interrogating the powers that be. At the same time, comedy can empower the same individuals, and as the #MeToo movement has shown, some comedians misuse the power to demoralize and subjugate others rather than directing it toward defusing oppressive officials and power structures. The Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby’s 2018 special Nanette, for example, powerfully addresses how comedy can reinforce the domination it claims to resist. Scholars of comedy have the opportunity and obligation to reveal how comedy and laughter both can undermine and reinforce the hegemony.²⁴

We should also make clear that we are not claiming that scholars have not considered stand-up comedians as intellectuals before. They most certainly have done so, though they have rarely used that term. Rather, by focusing our attention here on recent stand-up comedians we seek to explore how stand-up comedians have expanded into other media, including books, television shows, social media, and film, to exalt their various intellectual priorities. In so doing, they do not so much give up their reputation as stand-up comedians as leverage themselves into the role of public intellectual, very often of the organic variety theorized by Gramsci. This framing builds on foundational and emerging scholarship on stand-up comedians as anthropologists (Koziski), social and cultural mediators (Mintz), cultural critics (Gilbert), activists (Krefting), and rhetoricians (Meier and Schmitt) to explore how the enduring and changing significance of stand-up comedians impacts our social, cultural, and intellectual life in the United States.²⁵ In the chapters that follow, scholars (much like their subjects) adapt an accessible approach to analyze, understand, and even critique how stand-up comedians present complex ideas to their public. They complicate Garber’s presumptions while conscientiously avoiding simple explanations of how these comedians balance politics, comedy, and commentary. Through these nuanced explorations, Taking a Stand reveals that quite often the most pleasurable comedy in fact offers a forceful, even radical stance that deserves more attention and analysis than those outside of comedy are willing to give it.

No edited collection is either complete or without flaws, and we want to acknowledge the deficits of this collection. We had commissioned chapters on more women comedians, for example, but various circumstances led those authors to withdraw. The absence of those contributions is made even more lamentable by the volume of excellent feminist scholarship, both historically and recently, on women’s stand-up comedy. We hope this present collection will continue the discussion on stand-up comedians as public figures, including articles and books that will address the gaps herein.

The chapters have been clustered thematically, starting with chapters that focus on the local perception of bodies, broadening to works that address the interactions between subjectivities and audiences, and finishing with pieces about comedians working with broad national themes ranging from religion to politics. As with any organizational approach, many of the chapters could fit seamlessly in other sections, but the current groupings bring order to an otherwise often unwieldy topic.

COMEDIC BODIES AND THE BODY POLITIC

Comedians’ bodies are as much a part of their performance as the words they speak: Robin Williams used his as a prop, Moms Mabley used hers to seem innocent while her humor very rarely was, and Joan Rivers grounded her failures as a woman in jokes about her physical appearance. In this spirit, Taking a Stand opens with Linda Mizejewski’s chapter on Mo’Nique, an appropriate starting point given Mizejewski’s influential work on comedy and femininity, Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics. Mizejewski focuses her argument here largely on Mo’Nique’s special, I Coulda Been Your Cellmate (Binkow, 2007), to demonstrate not only how the performance creates a sisterhood between the performer and audience, but also how the stage, the set, and the costuming all reinforce a hierarchical relationship between the speaker and her immediate audience that carries over to the television audience (home viewers) and the live audience (women in prison). The section then turns to Christopher J. Gilbert’s chapter, which makes a similar argument about the politics of visibility present in the work of Bobby Henline, a war veteran who became a comedian after being severely injured by a roadside bomb during a military tour in Iraq. Henline forces audiences to confront the physical horrors of war, but Gilbert adds that Henline’s upbeat and positive approach to life creates the parallel risk of erasure, specifically of psychological trauma. As a proxy for injured soldiers, Henline creates in his performance a situation wherein audiences cannot look at him and simultaneously ignore his burns or missing limbs and ears. He makes the corporeal costs of war real, but the audience might also leave with a sense that mental toughness and positivity alone can overcome PTSD and other mental illnesses.

Rebecca Krefting continues the examination of mental illness in her chapter, which approaches the potential of comedy to provoke empathy to combat social stigma in her appropriately titled chapter, Maria Bamford: A/Way with Words. Indeed, Krefting argues that Bamford pushes audiences to consider mental illness and its effect on gender equality and social hierarchies. She acknowledges that Bamford seems an unlikely candidate for the status of public intellectual, given her small stature and self-acknowledged childlike voice, but these only render her consistent and focused reworking of stereotypes of mental illness all the more powerful, especially given Bamford’s ability to avoid preachy material.

Kathryn Kein’s chapter on Tig Notaro continues the consideration of bodies and threat. For Kein, Tig Notaro’s use of discomfort opens up the possibility of cultural citizenship for cancer patients (and others who have fallen ill) as well as people who identify as androgynous. Kein argues that Notaro creates productively uncomfortable pauses that capitalize on cringy material and, in doing so, walks audiences through a revision of stigma. Kein argues that Notaro’s hyperbolic awkwardness uses humor to undermine previous associations of awkwardness with shame, replacing them with positive associations. Likewise, Notaro creates a number of jokes about the ways people understand her androgyny, a topic that is front and center in Notaro’s comedy—especially in her second special, titled Boyish Girl Interrupted (Karas and Notaro, 2015). Most importantly, Kein argues that Notaro’s contribution to public intellectualism rests in her new representation of abject bodies.

COMPLICATED SUBJECTIVITIES

The next cluster of chapters interrogates complications that arise when comedians, their subject positions, and their comic material create complicated, if not outright paradoxical, ideological positions. This section opens with a chapter by Philip Scepanski, who raises questions about the ways race and class do (and do not) intersect in Chris Rock’s stand-up material. While some critics have challenged Rock’s treatment of race, arguing that he confuses or conflates race and class in problematic ways, Scepanski draws upon both Rock’s work and the outside criticisms of his work to show that Rock’s perspectives on class and class mobility are infused with and defined by race.

Raúl Pérez continues the intersectional analysis of stand-up comedy in his thoughtful discussion of Lisa Lampanelli’s most racially problematic material. Here, Pérez addresses the almost paradoxical nature of Lampanelli’s success: many of her jokes depend on an outright racist conceit, yet she remains successful in a hypersensitive environment especially concerning racial matters. Pérez argues that Lampanelli skirts claims of serious racism by articulating a post-racial fantasy, defined by an imagined world devoid of racism’s historical importance. The ethical dilemma, Pérez argues, is that Lampanelli’s work creates a model for racist jokes. Miriam M. Chirico considers a parallel complication between subjectivity and ethics in John Leguizamo’s work. Chirico asks where the line is between challenging and reifying cultural stereotypes of ethnic identity in Leguizamo’s dramatic monologues about identity formation and presentation. The difficulty Chirico highlights is that the audience determines many of the ways stereotypes are made, reinforced, or deconstructed. A Latinx audience would be unlikely to receive the material in quite the same way as mostly white audiences, so Chirico tests Leguizamo’s thesis that he creates prototypes rather than exploiting stereotypes—a claim Chirico finds complicated by the audience’s ability to recognize and understand the jokes’ cultural valence.

David Gillota’s examination of Louis C.K. tracks an equally problematic tethering of progressive politics to white privilege. Gillota examines C.K.’s inability to move fully outside his own privileged position in order to create a cohesive criticism of that same privileged position. Gillota contends that C.K.’s work critiques American capitalism from a privileged position. But, Gillota points out, C.K.’s positions remain largely inconsistent and often contradictory, as we learned from recent revelations of his sexual misconduct. Timothy J. Viator offers a related assessment of Jerry Seinfeld’s challenge of political correctness. Viator points to Seinfeld’s criticism of political correctness as a valid metric for assessing comedy and instead insists that comedy only be judged by the laughter it produces (or does not produce). Viator notes, however, that Seinfeld’s web series, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (2012–), steers away from humor to instead grapple with questions of social politics, ironically often returning to political correctness. More simply, Seinfeld’s later work depends on a contradictory position where he calls for comedy to be apolitical while simultaneously asserting his power as a comedian to make such arguments.

CHANGING VALUES IN A CHANGING AMERICA

Seinfeld’s contradictory take on political correctness reveals a broader trend: as the United States changes, for better or worse, new cultural anxieties emerge, and these tensions become more pronounced as digital media accelerate information dissemination. Some comedians embrace digital technologies and shifting social values, while other comedians remain steadfast in their embrace of tradition. Still, comedians who address national politics, social or governmental, are united in their ability to respond to wide cultural shifts. To open this conversation, this group of chapters begins with Monique Taylor analyzing W. Kamau Bell’s articulation of a social justice vision that utilizes the potential of digital media platforms. Bell, who has gained national attention through his CNN docuseries, United Shades of America (2016–), cut his teeth on podcasts and other digital projects. Rather than considering social mores in a changing media landscape, as Aziz Ansari does, Bell utilizes emergent technologies to harness the power of the hashtag (169). Taylor shows how Bell fits squarely into a tradition of Black intellectualism that speaks to an audience specifically interested in matters of race, whether because they belong to that group (i.e., Black public intellectuals speaking to Black audiences) or because they care about the topic (i.e., white audiences interested in social justice). Bell’s power, argues Taylor, rests in his and other Black public intellectuals’ ability to appeal to demographically diverse audiences in a way that opens difficult conversations about race in America.

Ila Tyagi’s chapter addresses Aziz Ansari’s engagement with pro-feminist masculinity in the digital age through what Tyagi terms smartphone sociology. Ansari’s comedy, which often utilizes his cell phone and social media accounts as props, raises questions about social mores and feminism in the digital age. Moreover, Tyagi argues, Ansari’s oeuvre includes characters like Tom Haverford (Parks and Recreation [2009–2015]), a character who utilizes social media to hyperbolic proportions, or Dev Shah on Master of None (2015–), an up-and-coming millennial professional who constantly seeks clarity about evolving social mores in the digital age. Tyagi draws upon Ansari’s many comedic registers to show that his engagement with love and heartbreak in the digital age works to challenge binary views of technology’s potential harm and benefits.

Susan Seizer and Aviva Orenstein examine the relationship between the audience and the performer through the work of regional road comic, Stewart Huff, using a clear and accessible ethnographic approach. They argue that Huff deserves the status of Intellectual at Large, despite his small following and geographical limitations, because he has an openness to new ideas that many other comics (and audience members) do not. Huff pairs this openness with an almost incantatory use of tropes that "encourages the audience to make the show with him (emphasis added), a dynamic that creates opportunities for audiences to enter into self-reflection that leads to empathy. In a related address of how comedians respond to their audiences’ ideological dispositions, David R. Dewberry argues that Dan Whitney’s character Larry the Cable Guy can be understood as a postmodern intellectual, as defined by Zygmunt Bauman. Rather than accept a limited definition of the public intellectual, Dewberry reframes the public intellectual as a sort of social liaison between a specific community and other communities. Dewberry contends that Larry the Cable Guy’s anti-intellectualism, especially his attack on political correctness, presents an alternative to the aristocratic legitimation and social superiority of the intellectual in a tweed jacket" (224). Dewberry argues that Larry the Cable Guy’s broad public reach and consistent antipathy to political correctness render him an unusual public intellectual, but no less a shaper of public thought.

Thomas Clark moves back to race and social politics by suggesting that Doug Stanhope also connects race and class through what Clark terms the white libertarian stand-up tradition (237). Clark suggests that Stanhope provides a work of total criticism that addresses the social anxieties of humanity as a species, of society, nation, and family (238). The inherent shortcoming of Stanhope’s existentialist lens, argues Clark, is the reliance on nihilism that leaves humans resigned to a world without objectivity, a dynamic that safeguards white privilege. Clark argues that Stanhope represents the modern-day embodiment of Emerson’s man thinking or even Thoreau’s majority of one, all while maintaining the troubling segregation of American society into disconnected filter bubbles of closed discourses (238). Rob King also advances the discussion of national social politics in his chapter exploring Bill Hicks’s attempt to reclaim comedy’s ‘healing’ promise as a response to an increasingly disenchanted America. Drawing on comic form and biography, King argues that we can view Hicks’s comedy as a sort of holy mission that confronts capitalism’s corrosion of American ethics. King suggests that Hicks offers less of a diatribe against American culture and more of a church sermon that provides both comprehensive assessment of social problems and an imagined alternative world to which rationalism can retreat. Though he died in 1994, Hicks’s approach and influence continue to resonate within the world of stand-up comedy.

Taken together, the chapters in Taking a Stand consider a wide array of comedians, intellectual traditions, and sociopolitical complications. Whether a comedian serves as a comic shaman, cultural anthropologist, organic intellectual, or any other of the myriad roles available to comedians generally, one point remains clear: comics respond to and seek to reconcile contemporary anxieties. This collection examines how comedians navigate, understand, and even exploit those ongoing rifts and tensions to position themselves as essential contributors to our national conversation.

Notes

1. Megan Garber, How Comedians Became Public Intellectuals, The Atlantic, May 28, 2015.

2. See, for example, Jennette Tandy, Crackerbox Philosophers in American Humor and Satire (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1964); Tracy Wuster, Mark Twain, American Humorist (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2016); Richard D. White Jr., Will Rogers: A Political Life (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2011); and Sean Zwagerman, Wit’s End: Women’s Humor as Rhetorical & Performative Strategy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010).

3. Rebecca Krefting, All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 2–5.

4. Linda Mizejewski, Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 15.

5. Matthew R. Meier and Casey R. Schmitt, Introduction: Standing Up, Speaking Out, in Standing Up, Speaking Out: Stand-Up Comedy and the Rhetoric of Social Change, ed. Matthew R. Meier and Casey R. Schmitt (New York: Routledge, 2017), xxii.

6. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 9.

7. Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 10–11.

8. Said, Representations, 11.

9. Garber, How Comedians Became Public Intellectuals.

10. Regina Barreca, Preface, in Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice, ed. Peter Dickinson, Anne Higgins, Paul Matthew St. Pierre, Diana Solomon, and Sean Zwagerman (Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013), xv.

11. Ian Brodie, A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-up Comedy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 218.

12. Richard A. Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 5.

13. Posner, Public Intellectuals, 161.

14. Daniel Drezner, The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats Are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 9.

15. Drezner, The Ideas Industry, 10.

16. David Gillota, Stand-Up Nation: Humor and American Identity, Journal of American Culture 38, no. 2 (June 2015): 105.

17. John Limon, Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 6.

18. Jessyka Finley, Raunch and Redress: Interrogating Pleasure in Black Women’s Stand-up Comedy, Journal of Popular Culture 49, no. 4 (2016): 794.

19. Elizabeth Bruenig, Comedians Are Funny, Not Public Intellectuals, The New Republic, June 3, 2015.

20. Said, Representations, 14.

21. Lawrence E. Mintz, Standup Comedy as Social and Cultural Mediation, American Quarterly 37, no.1 (Spring 1985): 75.

22. Bambi Haggins, Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 243.

23. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1966), 6.

24. For example, Raúl Pérez has demonstrated how comedy can reinforce harmful social scripts around race and ethnicity that it claims to be using playfully or ironically. See Raúl Pérez, Rhetoric of Racial Ridicule in an Era of Racial Protest: Don Rickles, the ‘Equal Opportunity Offender’ Strategy, and the Civil Rights Movement, in Standing Up, Speaking Out: Stand-Up Comedy and the Rhetoric of Social Change (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017), 71–91.

25. In addition to earlier citations of Mintz, Krefting, and Meier and Schmitt, see Stephanie Koziski, The Standup Comedian as Anthropologist: Intentional Culture Critic, Journal of Popular Culture 18, no. 2 (September 1984): 57–76; and Joanne R. Gilbert, Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender, and Cultural Critique (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004).

1

MO’NIQUE

Con Woman and Sister Citizen in I Coulda Been Your Cellmate

Linda Mizejewski

A BIG FAT MOTHERFUCKING SEX SYMBOL

The incarcerated girls I met at a juvenile detention center several years ago were crazy about Mo’Nique. Pretty! Hot! And Thick! they yelled. They were cheering the anagram P.H.A.T. in the Mo’Nique movie Phat Girlz (Likké, 2006), a comedy that hijacks fatness into fabulousness and rewards large-bodied women with sex, romance, and an upscale wardrobe. Not many of these girls were actually fat or thick. But P.H.A.T. was the movie’s catch-phrase, celebrating female bodies not often seen in romantic comedies—Black bodies most of all, and bodies that don’t fit runway measurements of femininity. The girls especially loved the sex scene in which Mo’Nique insists the lights stay on so she can better see her naked Nigerian hunk—and be seen by him as well. Phat Girlz was almost universally panned by critics, who rolled their eyes at its predictable one-joke structure. But that one joke—large Black women claiming acknowledgment and desirability—spoke to those girls.

They were at the Scioto Juvenile Correction Facility in Delaware County, Ohio, about an hour’s drive from Columbus. A colleague in Women’s Studies who was working with the girls had arranged to bring in speakers for presentations in the spring of 2011. Driving the rural roads through the increasingly isolated countryside to get to the bleak spill of buildings there, I used to think of the phrase put away, and about how far away these girls had been put. They were often noisy and disruptive, and my colleague pointed out that they were anxious to get attention from any adult who wasn’t a corrections officer.

The Mo’Nique film I’d originally planned for them was her comedy special/documentary I Coulda Been Your Cellmate, filmed just fifty miles away at the Ohio Reformatory for Women, which houses women serving sentences for felonies and violent crimes. The show stirred up some controversy when it was aired on television because Mo’Nique presents the women sympathetically in interviews in the first few minutes of the special, and because during her stand-up routine she expresses admiration for their strength and endurance.¹ Performing for them in the prison yard, she calls out, You are all some beautiful fucking women! … We live in a society that will throw you the fuck away, like you no longer exist, and like you’re not valuable or worthy. She was filming at the prison, she tells them, because she wants people to look at them, and the camera often comes in for close-ups of the women assembled for her performance. You could be their mother, their daughter, their cousin, their aunt, their sister, their wife. I want people to see you still exist, she says. Because of the sexually explicit comedy in other parts of the show, I Coulda Been Your Cellmate was deemed too raunchy for the girls at Scioto, but as it turned out, they found in Phat Girlz the same message Mo’Nique had pushed at the women’s prison—that they were not throwaways, that even stigmatized and reviled bodies could be given visibility and respect.

This agenda syncs with decades of work by feminist criminologists concerned with the social invisibility of incarcerated women, despite appalling conditions in many prisons including sexual abuse,